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Force India Formula One Team Speeds Up with Panasas Storage

FREMONT, Calif. – Nov. 9, 2009 – Panasas®, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world’s most data-intensive applications, announced today that Force India Formula One Team has increased the performance and capacity of its engineering simulation solution through the deployment of Panasas ActiveStor storage. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a critical part of Force India’s car design process to continually improve the team’s on-track, aerodynamic performance.

In conjunction with physical wind-tunnel testing, Force India relies on virtual prototypes and CFD methods to improve racing car aerodynamics. Maximizing the impact of its CFD process leads to engineering advancements that provide the company’s drivers with the best chance of a podium finish. The challenge Force India faced from an IT perspective, was providing a data storage solution that could keep pace in this rigorous environment.

”With our engineers applying larger and more complex models, we were seeing a massive increase in storage requirements in terms of capacity and speed,” said Adrian Collinson, head of IT, Force India. “We required a high-performance storage solution that met our performance requirements, was easy to scale as our requirements grow, and was easy to administer and maintain. After testing other solutions, Panasas was the obvious choice - the scalability, speed and cost matched exactly what we were looking for.”

The Panasas ActiveStor solution was provided by UK channel partner, OCF plc. “Panasas is the perfect storage solution for data-intensive environments such as engineering simulation,” said Greg Furmidge, HPC account manager, OCF plc. “Any customer that requires performance and capacity with extreme ease-of-use should be considering Panasas. It was the perfect recommendation for Force India.”

“Panasas ActiveStor storage is now deployed at more than half of the world’s Formula One racing teams as well as many of the world’s major automotive, aerospace and general manufacturing organizations,” said Derek Burke, marketing director EMEA, Panasas, Inc. “We’ve got the right balance of capacity, performance and ease-of-use that helps our customers to innovate faster and at a lower cost.”

About Force India Formula One Team

Founded in October 2007 through the acquisition of Spyker F1 (formerly Midland F1 Racing and Jordan Grand Prix), Force India Formula One Team is based in Silverstone, UK, and co-owned by Dr. Vijay Mallya and Michiel Mol. The team participates in the FIA Formula One World Championship.

About OCF plc

Based in Sheffield, UK, with customers throughout Great Britain and Ireland, OCF designs, integrates and supports innovative high-performance computing, high-performance visualization and data storage solutions.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world’s most performance-intensive applications, helps commercial, government and academic organizations accelerate their time to results leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. Panasas’ high-performance storage systems enable customers to maximize the benefits of compute clusters by eliminating the storage bottleneck created with legacy network storage technologies. Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters, in conjunction with the ActiveScale® Operating Environment and PanFS™ parallel file system, offers the most comprehensive portfolio of storage solutions for high performance computing (HPC) environments. Panasas is headquartered in Fremont, California.For more information, please visit www.panasas.com.

Panasas, ActiveScale, DirectFLOW and PanFS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panasas, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.